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Fifth space tourist set to blast off

Charles Simonyi trained for his upcoming Soyuz mission to the space station on an aircraft that simulates weightlessness

(Image: Space Adventures)

Microsoft’s former chief architect Charles Simonyi is preparing to become the fifth private citizen to take a trip to the International Space Station aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket on Saturday.

Russian cosmonauts Fyodor Yurchikhin and Oleg Kotov will be ferrying Simonyi to the station. Their Soyuz rocket is scheduled to take off from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 1730 GMT (1330 EDT).

Simonyi, the man behind Microsoft’s Word and Excel programmes, says he has enjoyed the months he has spent training for the trip in Russia. “I view the space flight as kind of an exclamation point at the end of a very long sentence,” Simonyi recently told reporters.

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On 27 March, he wrote about a send-off breakfast before he and the crew left Russia’s Star City training centre for Baikonur. “There are many toasts,” he wrote in a post on 27 March. “I’ve learned to drink to the toasts with water in vodka glasses, nobody minds.”

During his nearly two weeks in space, Simonyi will be conducting some experiments for the Japanese, Russian and European space agencies, as well as the Hungarian space office. For Hungary and Russia, he will wear a dosimeter to measure his radiation exposure during his time in space.

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For the European Space Agency (ESA), he will participate in an experiment on microgravity-induced anaemia. Microgravity tricks the body into thinking it has too many red blood cells, and the body responds by killing some of the cells. This results in anaemia when the astronauts return to Earth.

Another ESA experiment will study how muscle shrinkage in space affects lower back pain. Simonyi will conduct additional ESA experiments on radiation and microbes in space.

For the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Simonyi will test how high-definition camcorders degrade due to the higher radiation levels in orbit.

In addition to the experiments, the Budapest-born Simonyi will take along three drawings created by Hungarian children and two books to add to the space station’s library – Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe’s Faust (in German and English) and Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. He is also taking his passport to have it stamped on the station.

Thirteen days after he launches, Simonyi will be brought back to Earth by two of the station’s current residents, cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin and astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, who broke the 196-day US record for the longest single spaceflight on Monday.

To date, four private citizens have paid for rides on the Soyuz to the ISS – Dennis Tito, Mark Shuttleworth, Gregory Olsen and, most recently, Anousheh Ansari. They booked their flights, which cost &dollar;20 million to &dollar;25 million, with the Russian space agency through the US firm Space Adventures.